Keith Richards: sympathy for the librarian

"Life," the autobiography of rock and roll legend Richards, 66, is due in October from Little Brown, and it's a perfectly logical assumption to expect drugs, booze, sex and that whole snorting of his father's ashes story to be detailed in its pages. Perfectly logical, especially on the heels of "I Am Ozzy" earlier this year, autobiography of rocker Ozzy Osbourne and in which Osbourne details some of the rather bold defining moments of his life, such as the way he credits Charles Manson for his band, Black Sabbath, and their signature sound. Ahem.

But unlike Osbourne's book, which told the story of a mostly rough and tumble life with only a hint of a gentler self (We learn, for example, of Osbourne's brief childhood aspiration to enter the Catholic priesthood, though the book's confession was perhaps foreshadowed slightly by Lester Bangs in 1972 when he referred to Sabbath as probably the "first truly Catholic rock group."), Richards' book promises to capture more of his inner life than his wilder, public life. And that inner life is filled with books.

Richards, who has devoted much time in recent years to his home libraries, at one point considered "professional training" in library science to manage his home collections. Despite eventually not pursuing librarian credentials, Richards apparently attempted to arrange his home collections using the Dewey Decimal system:

The guitarist started to arrange the volumes, including rare histories of early American rock music and the second world war, by the librarian’s standard Dewey Decimal classification system but gave up on that as “too much hassle.” He has opted instead for keeping favoured volumes close to hand and the rest languishing on dusty shelves.